Ever walk into your local post office, see 30+ people waiting in line to mail their packages, and three postal workers are working as fast as they can to move people through? Sometimes it takes me more than 30 minutes to hand off a Priority Mail package for delivery to a client. It reminds me of the song Johnny Mathis made famous, The Twelfth of Never, or the famous U. S. Army line "Hurry Up and Wait."
Usually I grab my ticket first usps careers, go get my mail from my postal box, go next door to buy a copy of USA Today from John's Mountain Home Bakery, think about buying a couple of bismarks and a chocolate milk, and then return to the post office and read my paper until my number is called.
I am a pretty good sport about this because it has been my 30-plus-year experience in business that the United States Postal Service (USPS) does an outstanding job of moving our mail and packages around on time.
Yesterday there was a long wait and people were talking quietly to one another, saying things like, "Geez, can't they get some more help," or "I have never seen workers move so slowly," or "I hate having to wait so long, I have things to do."
After getting up to the counter, I became acutely aware of something I have noticed before but had not registered in my mind. The worker would tap the monitor of their new computer software system, and then wait, I mean literally wait two or three seconds, and then tap it again. I realized the postal worker who looked slow or inefficient was actually waiting on a new computer system that was slow and inefficient.
Imagine yourself running a huge company (in this case a government-owned corporation that is a statutory monopoly) that delivers 212 billion pieces of mail to 144 million homes, businesses and postal boxes (23 million pieces daily in New York City alone), ends up handling more than 44% of the world's card and letter mail volume, and serves more than 7.5 million customers daily in 37,000 post offices. This is all accomplished with 700,000+ employees and 260,000 vehicles.
Your USPS is the third largest employer in the country after the United States Department of Defense and Wal-Mart. Talk about a big business. The USPS has annual revenue of $70 billion.
Now focus on Wal-Mart, a publicly held business with 1,800,000 employees worldwide and nearly 6,500 stores and wholesale clubs in 15 countries. Wal-Mart did $312 billion in revenue last year, $242 billion more than the USPS. I will bet that the USPS would like to net almost $11.2 billion like Wal-Mart did last year.
Given these facts, I ask myself: Would Sam Walton (the founder of Wal-Mart) tolerate a slow, inefficient software system like the USPS uses? Absolutely not. He would find and buy a much faster, much more efficient system to increase productivity, and then pass on the savings to his customers.